Electronic bill presentment and payment (EBPP) systems are known. Indeed, a number of businesses provide their customers with the opportunity to access billing information electronically, review the bill and electronically settle account debts. As an extension of this service, a number of companies such as, for example, CheckFree Corporation of Atlanta, Ga., accept billing information from a number of businesses for presentment and payment by subscribing consumers. In addition to the inherent convenience of reviewing and paying bills electronically, such services have an added feature of consolidating bills from a number of different creditors (billers) for review and payment from a single location (e.g., a single web-site). The acceptance of such systems has grown at a healthy rate over the last couple of years, as more and more consumers become comfortable with the idea of executing financial transactions over a public data network (e.g., the Internet).
While the EBPP systems have been gaining in popularity with individual consumers, its use by business (or corporate) customers for billing other businesses (or corporate) customers has not grown at the same rate. One reason that corporate customers have been slow to utilize the EBPP services of their purveyors is their need to analyze and track billing information. Take telephone bills, for example. Many telephone companies provide their customers with the option of reviewing and paying their telephone bills online using their, or another company's (e.g., CheckFree) EBPP system. It is to be appreciated, however, that a telephone bill for a corporate customer can be infinitely more complex than that of a typical consumer. Unlike the typical consumer telephone bill, a corporate telephone bill will likely contain several different accounts, each containing hundreds or thousands of telephone extensions (numbers), each with hundreds or thousands of records of phone calls per month. Prior art EBPP systems typically loaded billing information in one of two ways. Some EBPP systems scan physical (paper) bills and simply provide authorized users a view of the scanned image. More sophisticated ones of the prior art EBPP systems electronically receive billing information into a flat database for presentation to users in a predefined format, facilitating payment by the authorized users.
In addition to the foregoing technical limitations, presenting such vast amounts of information which, inter alia, may well span several hundred pages (or screens) in an easily navigable form is quite difficult. The user-interfaces of prior art EBPP systems were designed to accommodate a typical consumer's billing information, i.e., which may span several pages but is unlikely to extend past, say, ten pages. Accordingly, EBPP systems employ a simple paging system with numeric “hyperlinks” to individual pages of the electronic bill. It is to be appreciated that, with hundreds or thousands of pages, such a paging system paradigm begins to fail when applied to corporate customers. Consequently, many EBPP system providers use a paging system typical of online search engines, wherein the immediate ten (10) pages are available for access, requiring a user to hit a “previous” or “next” hyperlink to view the preceding or succeeding ten pages. Again, when a user needs to access page 110 of a 315 page bill, such a paging system is cumbersome at best.
Moreover, a corporate customer often needs access to the data itself for analysis, re-rating (i.e., where an intermediary business marks up billing information on a line-item by line-item basis for presentation to a third-party customer), and control purposes. While certain prior art systems may manually provide users with the data (e.g., on a CD-ROM) for analysis purposes, such “off-line” systems do not support electronic remittance and do not enable the user to manage billing information (e.g., category names, definitions, etc.). Even more limiting than the user interface, though, is the lack of any substantial analysis capability. Prior art EBPP systems do not provide any substantial analysis tools other than, perhaps, different levels of static detail of the billing information. Similarly, the reporting tools are typically limited to 10 to 60 pre-formatted (or, “canned”) reports. It is easy to understand why such analysis services are not provided. First, providing a user with the requisite access to the billing data necessary to perform such analysis presents a security risk and, as such, an unattractive administrative burden on the EBPP provider. Second, the analysis needs vary from EBPP site to site. Thus, an inordinate amount of costly developer time would have to be spent customizing each customer's site with the desired analysis tools. Moreover, these analysis requirements may very well change over time, further consuming development time.
Those skilled in the art will appreciate that each of the foregoing limitations inherently limit the scalability of such prior art EBPP systems, thereby limiting their ability to accommodate the billing requirements of corporate customers.
Thus, an electronic financial management and analysis system and related methods is required, unencumbered by the inherent limitations commonly associated with prior art EBPP systems. Indeed, what is required is an Electronic Bill Presentment, Analysis and Payment (EBPAP) system. Just such a system is introduced below.